Innovation and Inspiration

We held our first annual district STEAM Showcase on Saturday, May 16th! Many of our teachers, students, and families came out to celebrate the great STEAM learning happening throughout our district! We also had many of our community partners attend to provide additional hands-on learning opportunities for our students. Some of the student presentation highlights were second graders teaching our superintendent how to use the Bee-Bots, fourth graders teaching others how to use Scratch, Middle School students driving their mousetrap cars, LegoRobotics, China and Egypt engineering projects, electricity circuit games, 3D printing projects, and MakeyMakey created video game controllers. We also had water rockets, Taiko recycled tire drumming, woodworking, StopMotion stations, a digital showcase, and art displays. It was a wonderful day to celebrate STEAM in Campbell!

The past few months, I've had the privilege of working with a few of the Marshall Lane CampbellCare 4th and 5th graders on the Tech Challenge. This year's challenge was Seismic Engineering in Action: Build an earthquake-safe structure! Kevin Theobald (site coordinator), Stanley He (leader), and I were also able to participate in the Tech Museum of Innovation's Tech Academy program. This provided us with ongoing support and PD to prepare our students to research earthquakes, materials, tools, the engineering design process, building designs, journaling, interviewing, innovation and teamwork. Last weekend, our students joined over 2,000 students from all over the state to compete in the 28th Tech Challenge! This annual challenge is sponsored by the Tech Museum of Innovation and is free for after-school teams. It was inspiring to see so many students and families there in celebration of engineering and innovation! Our students appropriately named their building ...

The 6th Grade Language Arts and Social Studies teachers at Monroe Middle School have proved that STEAM integrates well into all subjects! Nicole Lavia, Katie Herr, Andreas Zappacosta, and Jason Van Aken, planned a relevant and rigorous way for their students to extend their learning about Ancient China. All of the sixth grade students selected the STEAM discipline that they were most interested in focusing on. They then did additional research on an ancient China topic of their choice through the lens of Science, Engineering, Art, or Technology. The teachers were each experts in one of those disciplines and the students switched classes to be with that teacher for the three weeks of the STEAM projects. Some of the projects that students researched and completed were: Chinese medicine, hot air balloons, catapults, The Great Wall, calligraphy, shadow puppets, philosophers, and dynasties. On the final week, all of the students got to present their projects and the other students rotated...

The Bee-Bots have landed in Campbell!  I was so excited when my Bee-Bot order arrived last week.  I had first heard about them from the STEM teachers in Los Altos.  They use them with the kindergarten to second graders as a hands-on introduction to coding.  When teaching coding, it's so important for our youngest students to understand that coding doesn't just happen on a computer, but that it affects real life situations. Shelley Smith, second grade teacher at Castlemont, was the first teacher to pilot the Bee-Bots with us!  We first had her students use the free Bee-Bot iPad app a few days before to solve a series of 12 computational puzzles.   https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bee-bot/id500131639?mt=8   The app introduces the students to programming sequences of forwards, backwards, and 90 degree turns. Leading up the classroom pilot, Heather Haggerty, CUSD Manager of Technology Integration, and I prepared 5 Bee-Bot stations for the students to ...

The MakersFactory STEAMSpace has officially opened at Monroe Middle School!  Our newest STEAM community partnership will provide training in the use of  advanced technology tools, including 3D Modeling and Printing, MinecraftEdu, Game Design, Computer Programming, Electronics and Robotics.   They will also be working with the teachers at Monroe to implement and design lessons that teach Common Core Standards, 21st Century Skills, and Next Generation Science Standards.  This week, the Monroe teachers came in for an introductory STEAMSpace kick-off meeting!  They got to try out some of the new technologies and signed up for times to plan an integrated STEAM lesson with the MakersFactory instructors and to bring their classes in.   Some of the Monroe students have been working on 3D modeling and printing during a special lunch club and after-school class.  7th grader, Teddy Faravelli said, “3D modeling is cool and exciting.  It’s u...

Google recently released their free coding program, CS-First, for 4th - 8th graders.  When you register for the program at http://www.cs-first.com/ you can request that all of the student materials, lesson plans, and headphones be sent to your classroom.  There are currently seven modules to choose from: Game Design, Music & Sound, Fashion & Design, Storytelling, Art, Friends, and Social Media. In our district, a few teachers at Campbell Middle School have been using the materials during their STEAM workshops.  Katie Herr, has been using the Game Design lessons with her 6th grade coding lunch club at Monroe Middle School.  Her students have created a racing game, a maze game, a platform game, an escape game, and a launcher game.  In the next few weeks, they will also create a falling objects game and a cave surfing game.

To bring real life context to their fairy tale Core Knowledge unit, Jen Bell's kindergarten class at Rosemary participated in a building design challenge.  In groups of 2 or 3 students, students were able to select various building materials to build their house.  Their goal was to build a house that was strong enough to protect a paper pig.  Jen walked around with a wolf puppet, huffing and puffing to try to blow the houses down.  These young students learned the true meaning of perseverance as they learned about how to connect different materials and continued to improve upon their houses!